Thank you for voting / Ponoko test fit pieces!

First – a big thank you to everyone who voted for me in the sparkfun / ponoko / Geekdad contest – I won! From here on out I will be documenting my process as I go from rough prototype to finished laser cut beer vending machine! There will be an upcoming longer piece on how …

Missed out on Sparkfun free day? Buy it anyways!

So, like many of my readers I spent the morning watching firefox time out on sparkfun’s website. Eventually the clouds parted just in time for me to see the ticker go from 70k to 98k, to 100k. Just like that the first ever (annual?) sparkfun free day was over. I was bummed. Then I started …

Christmas gifts for geeks (pt 4) Arduino Edition

Introduction – just in case you haven’t renewed your geek card for the past year (decade?) Arduino is a term that refers to a microcontroller on a board that has certain hardware and software ‘shortcuts’ figured out. It was designed to be as plug and play as possible, and to lower the barrier to entry …

Christmas Gifts for Geeks (pt 3) MAKE magazine

There really are few magazines that I eagerly look forward to. There are even fewer that I can’t hold back from reading in the bookstore BEFORE my subscription arrives (I just can’t hold back!) MAKE is chock full of cool projects, ideas, and people. They have detailed build plans for some of their projects, and …

CD robot V 2.0! Adding serial control to an old scsi cd duplicator.

My newest project involves reincarnating a very old (1998) cd duplicating robot. It is a DTP-1000 that was originally SCSI only. Due to the fates smiling down upon me I was able to pick it up on ebay for $11. I bought it intending to put an arduino in the place of the control board …

7 questions for my avid fans

Seeing as how I am constantly inundated by media requests – I figured I would use my podium here to ask the readers a few questions. I look at it as distributed googling really, and hopefully finding some vetted answers in the sea of confusion that is out there. 1) has anyone used CHDK here? …

gmail notifier project (for dummies)

I’ve been really interested in doing J4mie’s Physical Gmail Notifier ever since it came out in February. I only recently dropped into the project and got to learn a lot about python, plists, and arduino auto-reset functionality. I’m going to share what I’ve learned because I think there are lots of other people out there …

DIY CNC router build update

It’s been quite a while since my router arrived in the mail. It came in mid winter and essentially stopped all cnc progress. It was much heavier than I had expected, and the gantry I had built wasn’t up to the task. The x and y axes were finished, but needed to be rebuilt stronger. …

Lego NXT vs Arduino

I have always been interested in Lego NXT. It seems like a really easy way to get into robotics, and programming. I have never really figured out how functional it is in the “real world” (whatever that means) The other day a coworker was really pushing the idea on me telling me I needed to …